According to the article Tyendinga Mohawks begin blockade for missing/murdered women, found here: “As of Sunday, roughly 70 members and supporters of the Mohawks of Tyendinaga erected a blockade on Shannonville Road, pushing for the Canadian government to host a genuine inquiry into the disappearances and deaths of Indigenous women across Canada — thus stating their dissatisfaction of the Oppal Inquiry.” During the blockage, Ontario police arrested 4 people who have since been released.

This is yet another response to the Canadian government’s lukewarm investigation of the missing and murdered Aboriginal women. When the Canadian Human Rights Commission called last year for this investigation, it was virtually ignored by the government. This community activism is an attempt to pressure officials into making real progress toward finding justice for these women and their families– some of those involved in the protest have missing family members themselves. “I hear more from the streets about my sister than I hear about from the cops,” said Tanya Nepinak, whose sister is counted among the missing (quoted here from CBC news).

This mirrors the narrative outlined in Missing Sarah– the refusal of officials to acknowledge the problem, the community organizing dedicated to pressuring  the powers at be to come up with a solution. Eventually, Vancouver’s police department did start an investigation, but Missing Sarah makes it painfully clear how slowly that investigation moved for a long time. The city and federal governments have both expressed regret at the systematic violence toward Aboriginal women, but while Vancouver eventually made real progress in their investigation, the national government has done virtually nothing. In Missing Sarah, it in part took the work of a white, highly educated, middle class, and locally fairly well-know person to jump start official interest and action in the missing women– and even then, it was an uphill battle at first. What or who will it take for the Canadian government to make change on a national level?

I recently came across this article on the murder of Loretta Saunders while researching something completely different, and it serves as a disturbing reminder of the painfully current nature of the violence against First Nations women described by Jiwani and Young and in Missing Sarah. An Inuk student at St. Mary’s University, Loretta Saunders was investigating the deaths of several Aboriginal women in her area when she went missing. Her body was found near a New Brunswick highway, and her death has been ruled a homicide. She was an Aboriginal women murdered while investigating the murders of other Aboriginal women. According to the article, over 800 Aboriginal Canadian women are considered missing or murdered– a number that is truly astronomical and horrific. Their deaths are often blamed on the individual responsible, as with Robert Pickton in the case of Vancouver’s missing women, and while of course they are guilty, their convictions do not speak to the full issue of violence against First Nations women. Violence that is this widespread and common doesn’t come from a random string of “disturbed” or “deviant” individual perpetrators; its root is systemic.

“She wasn’t what society expected for a missing aboriginal girl. Canadian society, and especially our prime minister, has been able to ignore the reality of the statistics that are against aboriginal girls” says Cheryl Maloney of the Nova Scotia Women’s Association (quoted in the aforementioned news article). Here, Maloney calls attention to what Jiwani and Young also get at in their article: there is a certain script in place for what missing Aboriginal women are supposed to be like, and Loretta Saunders did not fit into this script. But neither did any of the other missing women, because complex, real humans do not fit neatly into any boxes. These women are not worth mourning because they are someone’s wife, sister, or daughter; they are worth mourning as the diverse group of women whose lives were and are just as valuable as anyone else’s– and which were cruelly cut short because of a society that is capable of producing such racist and misogynistic ideas that their disappearances would become commonplace.

“There’s got to be a certain irony in speaking English, French and Latin. Why couldn’t they have appended Ojibway? And Ojibway history?” – Carl Beam page 34

As I did the reading prep for our class visit to the Museum of Anthropology, I kept noticing how often language (and the loss thereof) turned up in residential school survivors’ stories and art. Many of those interviewed mentioned the particular pain of losing their language, linking it to loss of culture and community. As Chief Robert Joseph recalled, replacing Aboriginal languages with English was an integral part of the Residential School’s mission, and the punishments for resistance were harsh: “I didn’t speak any language other than Kwak’wala. I started attending Grade 1 and the teacher was just brutal.She gave instruction in English, and if you didn’t respond correctly, you’d get cuffed in the ear or both ears, you’d get strapped on the back of the hand or on the palm of the hand, or you’d have to stand in a corner for two, three, four hours and just be left there.”

This reminded me of the work we have been doing in Geography on global culture and language; I believe Dr. Ley mentioned that a language disappears from the world every two weeks. English’s place as the second most spoken language on Earth is neither accidental nor innocent– it is the result of a long history of violence and brutal colonization. As we learned in Sociology, language is perhaps the basis for self-consciousness, and we use to to create our conscious thoughts. When one of the most basic and deeply-held aspects of self and communal identity is ripped away, there are bound to be consequences.

I’m not sure how to end this post, but I’d like to continue this discussion in another post or in my final paper, if anyone has something to add I’d love to read your comments.

Themes of hybridity and mixing (culturally, racially, linguistically, etc.) are woven throughout Diamond Grill, right from the beginning. In the passage we analyzed in class, Wah traces the history of Chinese-Canadians through the evolution of mixed grill– and the evolution of language along with them, from “mixed grill” at the beginning to “mixee grill!” at the end. Later on in the book, Wah takes up this mixed language again, this time looking at how “high muckamuck,” a Chinook jargon word, ended up in his family’s vocabulary, and in the cook’s slang as “you mucka high” (“Sitcum Dollah Grampa Wah Laughs as He Flips” pages 68-70). Included in this chapter is a footnote on Chinook jargon– something I had a passing familiarity with but had never studied in detail. As I did more research, it became clear just how deeply hybrid the language in this chapter is.

As it says in the footnote, Chinook jargon was created in order to facilitate trade, taking words from Chinook and Nuuchanuulth, French, English, and other First Nations languages. Chinook jargon is more than just an assembled group of different words, however. Words and mixed to become phrases, and pronunciation is sometimes swapped from tongue to tongue. Looking at a Chinook jargon dictionary, it’s clear that the language surfaced from a practical environment– with only about 500 words, the vocabulary is bare-bones and the grammar is simplified about as much as it can be. However, the language is suited well for its purpose. I had a great time looking through one of the dictionaries (here‘s another one) I found online. “Olo – Hungry   also means thirsty; in combination with other words can mean to need or to want, i.e. olo moosum – to be sleepy, to need sleep” for example.

Chinook jargon is more than a linguistic hybrid, however. It is the product of cultural meshing, of transaction, of communication out of necessity. More than a product, it is the very thing that facilitated this meshing in the first place. As Fred’s family slips bits of their native languages into English (his grandmother’s “oof-da,” for instance) they are also asserting a bit of their culture into a world that requests (and demands) homogenization and assimilation.

 I relied heavily on this well-cited source for basic information on Chinook jargon, and here’s an interesting modern take on its legacy.

Last blog post! Until… next term, that is. Dr. McNeill suggested in class that we could do a term-long reflection for our final post, and that’s what I’m going to do. What kind of reflection? The scholarly kind! Obviously! Getting a little overly casual here so let’s break it down. What does a scholarly reflection mean? Reflections in the traditional sense are just feelings, and as we have learned in ASTU feeling aren’t really what scholars are aiming for. As we have been told many, many, many times in class but I still often manage to forget, scholarly writing is supposed to be both “relevant” and “productive”  (see Academic Writing or Laurie for more info). If I were to summarize (which we learned how to do) the gist (we also learned that) of the knowledge I have gained in ASTU this term, I would say it boils down to that. Scholars have different expectations for writing than high school teachers do, and much of that has to do with what kind of knowledge is expected to be included in a paper. Of course there are also stylistic genre expectations for scholarly writing, but I’ll be talking about content because that is much more interesting to me.

I was apprehensive about coming to University, as I knew I would be required to write in styles that I was unfamiliar with. What I didn’t realize was how much less structure is often required from academic writing. It’s not a report, it can be a journey (to use a truly exhausted metaphor). A report is a collection of knowledge, to be sure, but it often falls short of really synthesizing the information it presents. Much of my high school writing could hardly be considered “productive” in any substantive sense of the word. Perhaps a reader might learn something new from one of my papers, but I doubt I produced many conclusions that would count as new knowledge in any field. That part of academia is exciting to me– that even as a first year (where I’m from, freshman), we are all capable of participating in and adding to a scholarly discussion, even if it’s in a small way. It’s possible we are coming up with ideas that no one has articulated before– and although nothing I write this year is going to be published anyway, it makes writing a little easier when I feel like I have something to contribute. Now that I think about it, much of my frustration with high school writing came from the lack of relevance or productivity that was expected from me. I didn’t feel like what I was writing was interesting or important, and the “so what” of my papers was “because I was told to do this.” There was no examining why it was helpful or significant to be examining my paper topics, which is an integral part of the academic process. And* it makes sense! Why do something if you don’t have a good reason?

Good luck on all your final papers, and I will see you next term! Er, at our midterms.

*I know I shouldn’t start a sentence with “and”… sorry, Laurie.

It is a phrase that gets tossed around quite a bit these days, and I often hear it from celebrities in particular when they describe their charity and advocacy work. Now, certainly, celebrities have a long history of charitable involvement, and with their access to resources and press attention, they are certainly uniquely positioned to work actively with humanitarian causes. This post is not to critique celebrity interest in humanitarian work– rather to critically examine some celebrities’ motivations, as well as critique some of the ways in which these causes are publicized by famous people. In their article Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog, life narrative scholars Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd detail the  American obsession with celebrities and their lives that has snowballed in the past couple of decades. They observe a “significant cultural trend in the 1990’s, the weakening boundary between the public and the private and the expansion of celebrity culture to politics and beyond” (page 3).

Celebrities now, more than ever before, have been given and national (and sometimes global) platform on which to speak, and many of them are using this attention to highlight humanitarian causes of their choosing. This is the age of the celebrity charity– and often, the effectiveness of these charities goes unquestioned, ethics relegated to the shadows cast by hollywood fame and glitter. Take Bono’s charity, for instance. More accurately, “charity.” Some of you may remember the 2010 scandal surrounding Bono’s ONE foundation (he is not the majority fund supplier, but acts more as a figurehead for the organization.) In September of that year, it came to light that around 1% of the funds donated to the charity were being given to the people it was supposed to be benefitting. Yes, 1%. With donations upwards of 5 million pounds, only 118,000 ever found their way to those in need. (Source)

Corruption, however, is not the only questionable choice celebrities make in their pursuit of charitable giving. I would like now to return to that phrase so often thrown around by celebrity advocates, and the sentiment behind it: “giving a voice to the voiceless.”  (One example here). Our work in class with Whitlock’s and Shaffer and Smith’s explorations of human rights and life narratives have been particularly helpful in guiding my analysis of this phenomenon (and I am not the first to speak on this, by far.) Who exactly, counts as “voiceless” in our society or around the world? Certainly, there are plenty of stories and human rights abuses that never make it to  center stage– but does that mean the people involved cannot speak? Of course some are deliberately silenced, but isn’t it more a question of selectively unheard than unable to share? Human rights violations are ignored, not incognito: those whose rights are being violated are quite aware of what is happening, and often do try to speak out. Celebrities claiming to be the “voice” of these people and events is an incredibly arrogant move, and one that serves to further dismantle the agency of the individuals involved. When attempting to humanize a person or cause, Whitlock reminds us that it is important to ask: who needs to be humanized in the first place?

At this point, I am sure many of you have heard of Malala Yousufzai (yes, I’m linking to Wikipedia– just a good way to get an overview if you’re unfamiliar), the young Pakistani girl who was attacked and nearly killed because she sought an education as a young woman. Her story sparked an outcry through the Western world, and she has since become an activist for women’s rights and education justice. She has written a book, “I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban” and appeared as a guest on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In short, the Western media loves her. However, our class readings on the overlap of human rights, commodification, and life narratives has made me question some of the ways she is talked about. Before we continue: Malala is absolutely an extremely courageous and very intelligent person– it is absolutely not the intention of this post to attack her in any way. Rather, I would like to draw attention to the way her story and she herself has been “commodified”, as Gillian Whitlock would say, by the West.

In her book “Soft Weapons,” Whitlock discusses the power of life narratives to insight change by illuminating injustice. Shaffer and Smith also highlight this in their article “Conjuctions: Life Narratives in the Field of Human Rights”. Both, however, also detail the potential for life narratives to become a tool that simple supports whatever dominant concepts the West has about itself and other countries. In the case of Malala, I believe that many Westerners are using her story to support the “enlightened, morally upstanding West” and “backward, corrupt East” tropes that are part of what Shaffer and Smith would call our “national myths.” For a more in-depth assessment of this, I will direct you here.

While perusing an unnamed social media site, I happened upon a brief story about another young Pakistani girl named Nabila. She recently traveled to the United States to speak at a Congressional hearing on CIA drone warfare, and spoke about her grandmother, a civilian who was killed by U.S. drones in Pakistan (I haven’t seen it, but her testimony is available to watch here). Only five member of Congress bothered to show up to the hearing.  Meanwhile, Malala’s story has been covered by pretty much every major news outlet in the United States. (In the interest of full disclosure– Al Jazeera has also made this comparison, but it was after I started writing this so I’m just gonna finish. It’s available here, and is much more in-depth than this post.)

Malala and Nabila are both brave, they both have important things to say, and they both deserve to be heard. Malala’s story meshes well with the West-as-savior daydream that many Westerners (and Western foreign policies!) buy into. Nabila’s opinion is unpopular: she is challenging our biases and standing up, as one young girl, to the entire U.S. government– and they refuse to even acknowledge her presence. A just nation doesn’t cherry-pick injustices that it finds convenient to fight, it pays attention to injustice everywhere. We must be aware of when we are complicit in this silencing and amplification, and pay close attention to whose stores are told.

In Blogging as a Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog (available here), Miller and Shepherd discuss the purposes of blogging for both the reader and writer. Yes, I know this is an article from pretty early on in the term… but bear with me. I will use their research to examine Post Secret (here), Six Word Memoir (here), and Facebook (here… I’m impressed that you need a link for that). I know that we have done considerable work with this in class (and at home, for some of you), but I think this will be a new angle on familiar topics.

Miller and Shepherd turn to James Atlas’ phrase “culture of confession” (link above, middle of page 4) to describe the current climate of American culture– people are sharing more personal things in increasingly public spheres than ever before. Post Secret, Six Word Memoir, and Facebook all exemplify this in their own way. Post Secret is, by its very design, made up of actual confessions. In the words of Post Secret itself: “[y]our secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything – as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.” (Source) It is, straight up, confessional. Very few submissions are selected to be posted, most will never be released in any public way. Even with this knowledge, thousands of submissions are sent– there is a deep desire for many people to have their experiences see the light of day, even if that is just through contact with one stranger.

An atypically PG example of a Post-Secret confession

Six Word Memoir is mostly significantly less “juicy” than Post Secret. It is less exclusive– anyone can post, and the only curating that happens is when posts are selected for books or highlighted by the editors. It allows the writer to confess, in a way, but it is from a much more literary/storytelling standpoint. Contributors are supposed to share their life stories or important aspects of their lives, rather than let slip a single illicit detail.

Finally, Facebook– by far the most well known and widely-contributed-to of the three sites. When describing Facebook, it is difficult not to make it sound like an extremely narcissistic endeavor. Though it is less public than Post Secret or Six Word Memoir, its relatively small-scale sharing is more than made up for by the complete lack of anonymity of its users to each other. It is fundamentally a social endeavor– after all, you are sharing posts with your entire community of friends. The personal confessional aspect, though, is loud and strong. This truly exemplifies a “culture of confession”: not only are you choosing to broadcast details of your life to basically everyone you know, but the details themselves are often the most banal minutia of your day. Lunch selection, a single youtube video, a haircut. Where else but a culture that values and demands confessions would such consistent over-sharing be seen as not just acceptable, but standard?

After visiting the Belkin Gallery and participating in the Walk for Reconciliation, I started to think about the importance of decolonization– that is, undoing elitist, damaging colonial ways of thinking in my life. I had intended to write a post about it at the time, but I pushed it aside and eventually got distracted by other things (…midterms…). It wasn’t until I read bell hooks’ “Feminism is for Everybody” for our political science class that I was reminded of its significance.

As bell hooks observes, “[m]ost American women, particularly white women, have not decolonized their thinking either in relation to the racism, sexism, and class elitism they hold toward less powerful groups of women in this society or the masses of women globally. When unenlightened individual feminist thinkers addressed global issues of gender exploitation and oppression they did and do so from a perspective of neocolonialism” (pages 45-46). I think this critique is relevant beyond examining modern feminist movements– many of us in Western culture often embody colonialist/imperialist values or ideas even as we try to undo and correct injustice. This “perspective of neocolonialism” has created and strengthened systems of oppression world-wide. It is easy, as a privileged person, to unthinkingly fall into the outdated colonial arrogance that has for centuries driven Western countries to conclude that they know what is best for other people. As highly educated students, we must be mindful of how these ideas are still present in the society we live in, and often subconsciously in ourselves.

Hearing about the atrocities of the Residential Schools, and, more recently, reading life narratives documenting the brutality of the United States invasion of Iraq (in Salaam-Pax and Baghdad Burning) made me want to commit to ways of thinking that will seek to prevent these kinds of imperialist horrors from happening again. I don’t think that it is enough to condemn these as the actions of others: I also need to examine how I might embody in my own life the same kinds of colonial values that make tragedies like this possible, and even commonplace. This unlearning will be a continual process of critically examining my thoughts and assumptions, of seeking out points of view that go against dominant Western thought, of interrogating the systems I contribute to and asking how I can change them.

One of the systems with the most impact on my life right now is UBC, fundamentally an academic institution focused on research. This is where I would like to start focusing on decolonizing. Academia is often an insular community, difficult for many to access; the research we produce is probably hard for the general population (and often myself!) to understand fully. I want to go to school (and live, like I do) in a place where all voices are heard and valued. Where the barriers many people face to join the conversation are talked about transparently, and serious efforts are made to tear them down. Where lived experience is valued, and diversity is respected as an essential component of any liberated space.